Aye! Before E: Pirate Princess

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I’m quite a fan of Moonpod’s games – Gametunnel’s game of the year from way back Starscape and inspired Head-over-heels/Final-Fantasy/System Shock riff Mr Robot – so I was surprised to see that they’d released a new game late last year and I hadn’t heard about it. It’s called Pirate Princess, and is basically a piratically-themed cross between Puzzle Quest and Bookworm Adventures. Quest, upgrade skills, get in duels, etc. Having had a quick play, it’s a great idea, but lacks the slickness of their previous games with the various UI choices driving Walker to distraction (e.g. tiny letter grids to select, easy-to-misread-font, etc). Still – you can get the demo here and see for yourself. Also! Footage follows! On Youtube! Or – ahahahahah – Yohohotube!

Well, let’s think about that. There are two classes of people to consider: those who will go to the site to watch the movie, and those who won’t. If the video is only on their site, they only have access to those who would go to the site to watch it. If these people don’t like the video, being on the site isn’t going to matter, and if they do, they would’ve gone to the site anyway.

If the video can be embedded, then they are now presenting it to both classes of people. If a given person likes it, they will go to the site to learn more, and if they don’t, being on the site likely wouldn’t make a difference anyway. So the reaction of individuals is the same, but they’ve presented their video to more people, meaning that more people will become interested. Therefore making the video embed-able is clearly the right choice, and not doing so is indeed marketing fail.

Tried the demo, it seemed very samey and less slick than Bookworm Adventures. It’s not as linear as BWA, but it seems Moonpod have taken that as an opportunity to stuff in loads of grinding and not much else. And it goes from ridiculously simple to teeth-grindingly frustrating in seconds. Not buying this, not even at a discount.